Considering the Work of John Parker: “The Break Down”
by Ruth Grover
Director and Curator Galleries, Exhibitions, and Collection
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

In the modern era, artists made legend with broad strokes and bold splatters applied in reference to Jungian psychology and the unconscious impact of automatism. They took up the brush and battled with paint and waged a mental and physical war in the world of art.  When the dust settled, the Abstract Expressionist movement had changed the course of aesthetics to include the visualization of uncontrolled and unmediated aspects of mental process, and the unmitigated primal urge of behavior. This victory left narrative paralyzed without will and unable to move, a sacrifice that lay wounded and unattended, abandoned in the field. The artistic production of the 21st century has set out to change that course and is conversely described in recent thinking as post-modern, or non-modern, or even anti-modern depending upon one’s perspective as moving on, denying, or waging yet another war.

Yet there is an alternate way, a cross disciplinary route with no signs of belligerence; a way that accepts the past and embraces the unknown and the proven and expansively applies these to life while assuming the advancements of a physical culture of science, mathematics, and engineering, a cerebral culture of philosophy and psychology, and an aesthetic culture of literature, music, art and art making. Along this way, narrative has been revived and given new life to stand once more and speak. This is the path of John Parker’s work.  It is an expansive path, yet it’s right in front of the eyes: no tricks; no deceptions; no intellectual posturing, but rather an honesty of place, and space, and being; a path that is illumined if one takes the choice to travel it and a path that in turn illumines those who do. In this regard, John Parker is a visual raconteur of moment and journey: a pathfinder and pathmaker, and voyager himself.

It seems significant that Parker’s road is not a traditional route.  His early exposure to the work of Robert Motherwell (work that comfortably floats some distance off shore when considering Parker’s oeuvre) came from acquaintances within the art school system in response to Parker’s being external to that structure.  If Parker himself had passed through the curriculum of traditional art training, his regard of Motherwell might well have been different.  Yet moving from the study of philosophy, where Parker grew weary contemplating the words of others, to that of the physical sciences, which provided a fundamental reality both in the description of the laws of nature and equations from which order and the probable effect of physicality could be derived, Parker found a un-jaded consideration of Motherwell as the mental strategist of Abstract Expressionism and ultimately his own approach to visual articulation.  Any affinity of Parker’s work to that of Motherwell is due neither to intent nor choice but rather to an inherent commonality, a similarity of passage. 

Parker leaves automatism and the tapping of the subconscious firmly with Motherwell in the past in order to intentionally picture the palpable present reality of the sciences as they elucidate and interrelate with our worldly and occasionally not so worldly experiences as a species.  This vision is at times poignant, ironic, and not without a nod to humor. It brings new breath to a dialogue that underscores the growing meaninglessness of the terms “non-objective” and “abstraction”, and encourages an expansion of the bibliography of “narrative”.  What is remarkable about Parker’s work is its strength of voice and lucidity, clearness of thought and style, and capacity to be perceived directly. What Parker makes is John Parker, the body, blood, brains, and being, all ingredients not of a recipe and predicted outcome, but of a formulation that expresses various solutions to transition toward a more universal exploration of what it is to walk around as a part of our physical world. 

For Parker the success of an individual work is directly related to the amount of energy he invests in that work. As energy is a constant, a marvelously fluid entity that does not dissipate nor increase but rather shape shifts in form, a work begins for Parker with the channeling of that force, the conversion of mass into movement.  He proceeds in a manner that is as fluid and fluent as the state he harnesses. The specific steps involved occur in no specific order. While positioning himself in the studio may seem the initial act, it is just one station within a much larger cycle.

Process of thought is mirrored by process of physicality. Parker works through a complex mathematical problem, for example determining the center of mass, breaking the lengthy proposition down into shorter and more manageable passages of equational thought each of which reveal distinct increments towards a resolution.  In concert Parker prepares his substrate whether it be metal, cleaned and polished, and handled with latex gloves, or wood, whose surface emerges with the manipulation, the push and pull, of joint compound spread across a planar expanse.  Craft is intrinsic.  Each work is built upon a strong foundation. That it was actively fashioned and assembled is occasionally reinforced by the physical presence of mechanical bolts to remind us that the work is not just made but solidly engineered from beginning to end.

The visual surface grows in the dynamic exchange of physical motion with cognitive choice and consideration. While comparable to the electrostatic charge between two facing polarities, this scientific effect only serves to fuel the motivation of intention. Text, formula, and diagram, paint and mark are layered in the order in which they occur within the sequential narrative of Parker’s thinking.  The literal transcription of actual conscious thought in word and mathematic expression provide a spatial context for compositional components such as directing a pour of paint and the “getting physical” with tools. The intentional precision of marks produced by a pencil with a metal point or the vitality of those made with a dye grinder are stimulated, not dictated, by the joy and emotion that process bears. Surfaces become marvelously complex, even when visually subtle.  Color is employed with respect for its intensity and exuberance when handled within theory.  Again even when color is treated subtly, it is deep.

That Parker employs two opposing supports, wood and metal, further demonstrates his breadth.  Working on wood allows the option of reversing any act. Metal surfaces are not forgiving and demand preliminary deliberation as an action upon metal cannot be reversed without destroying its nature.  Planning, practice, and pre-process are necessary and lay with the knowledge of material properties, the disposition of tools, and a cognitive map of course.  Some who work on canvas find flexibility and refreshing insight with the medium of the monotype.  For Parker, the correlation of media is more comparable to the task of a musician.  Working on wood allows Parker the opportunity to create a score, to adjust all or parts by over-painting, reworking to attempt again, and build a surface that charts both changes and the original composition embedded in the layers of the piece.  Working on metal requires a definitive knowledge of the lines and the spaces between in musical composition, just as the spaces and lines of Parker’s notebooks describe mathematical formulae. Improvisation is coupled with the ability to traverse a scale precisely and distinctly without pre-knowledge of the notes to be hit, feeling them intuitively, yet knowing exactly how to make that note.  His performance on metal may superficially appear a result of chance, yet it is a practiced and considered expression in the spaces of the compositional plane.  The physicality of Parker’s work on metal is analogous to the amount of pressure a digit should exert upon the key of a saxophone and just how much simultaneous breath is necessary to create a tone of particular pitch and duration.

When asked about the progression of his work Parker replies that his sequence of action depends upon the specific work he is about. Mark and math, paint and music occur in interchangeable steps that relate to the situation presented. His response to surface and process is no different than a realist painter who decides to enhance an area with hue to create a stronger visual statement or delete it entirely to abstract and simplify, underscoring a visual effect.  Every step of Parker’s process is about the deliberation of image making within conscious and controllable act, and in that sense a progression of figuration.  The intuitional choices are no different than those faced by a painter of traditional landscapes.

Parker’s process advances until a work has enough energy, enough thought transformed to material presence, to create a full “statement” and stand in a delicate phase of immobility to await its release into motion again by the eyes and experience of the viewer. The surface is static only for the time it is not looked at. This change of state, the creation of it, appears to be Parker’s underlying preconception. Its chemistry borders upon alchemy, as you don’t glance at Parker’s work, you drink it.

The complexities of Parker’s surfaces are balanced with composure. There is clarity in the cogent delineation of boundaries that do not limit nor contain but describe a set of values in an expanded diagram of logic. I am often struck that while separated from the work certain phrases of vision are recalled and remembered distinctly. Without a wave of the wand, pattern recognition effortlessly materializes both form and content.

In concert with the visual, titles emerge as Parker guides the course of his surface to encounter moments of life during the building of its structure. These brief passages of single line poetry operate like mental arrows that flash though the psyche to touch a broadly shared target of emotional contemplation.  Some like “Elastic Head on Collision” (here speaking less of “accident” but rather to a total system in physics in which the kinetic energy of a clash between two moving bodies is conserved and in turn extends poetically to a sudden confluence of minds as matter) are squarely of our day.  Others like “She Promised Him Poems” or “Waiting for Night to Fall” could be uttered from any time or place but belong to the surface of their association; they describe what is seen. If none of what has already been said places the work further from sheer abstraction, Parker’s titles underscore a reality of existence as they operate not to justify or encapsulate the work, but openly render its experience in straightforward plainspoken language that is yet, like life itself, magnificently ambiguous.

As a demonstration of the interrelatedness of Parker’s process and thought, the above-mentioned “Waiting for Night to Fall” (2006) is one example of this power. As a mixed media work, the surface is constructed in layers of textural treatment, painting and over-painting, sanding, and marking again, all of which tells the eye that this mark was made now and that one was made before and this hue of paint happened somewhere in between. While not able to precisely speak to the mathematical problem whose distinct steps of resolution is embedded in the strata of the surface, I venture the possibility of a formula associated with the velocity of light as these layers invoke not just atmospheric perspective but a sequence of events whose moment of occurrence is expressed by the distinctness of the mark, the strength of the color. This is a tale of time and travel.

The proportional majority of the planar space of “Waiting for Night to Fall” is carried by an expanse of complex color, low in saturation, and receding in value.  Within this receding ground, large rectangles of a more saturated group of related darker hues progress forward.  These rectangles are aligned contiguously to form a compositional horizontal band depicted in a frontal eye-level perspective and further contain a random scatter of small squares and rectangles.  Color, value, and scale provide visual cues that translate these shapes into the walls of built structures with openings, windows that emit an internal light in anticipation of the title itself.  Their diagrammatic nature recalls not just the paper napkin renderings of a Florida architect but also the wall drawings of a village in the shrines of the Neolithic town of Catal Huyuk.  This relationship moves both forward and backward in time from ancient settlement to Brooklyn street and simultaneously shifts laterally to other towns and cities that lay across the nautical expanses of ocean and sea.

The decisive moment of “Waiting” occurs with an energetic yet less distinct and over-painted fine diagonal line, a trace of a path that occurred some moments ago to quixotically descend across space in an irregular manner as if affected by other natural forces such as the density of atmosphere that it appears to have negotiated. This linear movement ends in present time with a deeply saturated splash of pigment upon an edge-to-edge black horizontal bar that occupies the foreground and gravitationally anchors the lower edge of the picture plane, a position that simultaneously poses the question “does the ‘fall’ of night mean the beginning of ‘day’?”.  This visual conception demonstrates the physicality of the progression of nightfall as an anticipated yet suddenly surprising event, a whimsically incongruent and intellectually and emotionally moving depiction of what that experience is. 

As the wall drawings of prehistory sought to visualize natural phenomena to perhaps predict and understand or possibly worship and control, “Waiting for Night to Fall” expresses analogous thoughts tempered by our own present experience: the necessary opposition of white and black in the physics of light; the measure of a day from light to darkness and the reassuring succession of this sequence for lives lived between the two; the ability and desire of man to counter darkness with the generation of light; even the awesome force of a burning meteor hurtling from the sky to explode on impact and bring darkness with a hopeful rise of light again.  Science and the known, spirituality and the unknown, the irrationality of the rational, and man balanced on the brink of his own destruction all derive from Parker’s marks and math, the compositional order of value, scale, and placement, and the momentary closure of a splatter of paint accompanied by a title: an event not pictured, nor even considered, until regarded in Parker’s space.

Parker’s work is not involved with abstractions. His process assumes the correlation of mathematics and the laws of physics as these apply to the course of human behavior.  In regards to the concept of critical mass, Parker speaks of his thinking that if enough people regardless of their geographic location put their minds simultaneously to a single common thought, their assembled energy could turn the course of power. For Parker, art and math are not right-brain versus left-brain activities but aspects of one entity just as the working of an equation of physics sheds light upon the navigational lanes of daily experience. His process is about reality.  Every mark is made consciously in an effort to determine a solution of solidity, substance, and soul.

The history of art demonstrates this relationship as science, thought, and visual representation have all found themselves at times in harmony since the days of the Renaissance if not those of Prehistory. The way we see the world and the way we see ourselves has traveled through the discovery of atoms, microscopic photography, the bridling of electricity, the telescopic investigation of the universe, “cogito ergo sum”, mathematical linear perspective, the Fibonacci sequence, and the Golden Section, to cite a few   The revelation of these aspects drawn from nature are also of our lives, as our bodies and minds are both a part of the natural world and no different than the lively behavior of ice particles within a cloud of the sky or the intimate activities of molecules upon the surface of the earth, all susceptible to gravitational attraction and friction, and capable of being expressed by the algorithms of mathematics.  Yet Parker does not attempt to scientifically dissect what we are but rather images the raw brilliance of the intricacies of our situation.

Parker’s work is rich. It is coherently and formally well grounded in theory, both of color and composition, and in concept from within and beyond the realm of art. While Parker speaks of himself as “blue collar” this reference most aptly equates to “an honest day of hard work”.  The visual relationships that Parker builds through his courtship with experience express nothing more than the direct sensuality of a search for inner strength and mastery, for sensitivity coupled with the openness of vulnerability, for the fuel of active passion.

While I might be called to court to answer a statement, which I am tempted to make, that Parker’s work is more resonant than that of Motherwell’s, I could take the stand and make a case that all art is to varying degrees biographical and that the depth of biography is directly proportional to the depth of the work an artist produces.  In Parker’s respect, he did not set out to be an artist nor a musician but after exploring the thoughts of men exclusive of technical precepts and the practical arts, he took a turn to study thermodynamics, the laws of relativity, and equations to determine load capacity of a beam, and intellectualize their application. Along his trek he did become both musician and artist.

From my own brief foray into Existentialism, I remember most clearly two applicable thoughts:  that a chair is not a chair unless someone is sitting in it (i.e. that an artist “is” only for the duration of making art); and that the experience of life is a series of decisions similar to forks in a road as to take one path over another does not mean that the path not taken won’t appear again.  In his conversion of mass into energy, energy into mass, Parker visually discovers paths and their branches, from a diagram of the vectors of an XYZ coordinate system to the split of a line incised by a power tool, and coherently assimilates these marks into an architectured landscape of assembled structure, color, texture, and the connective tissue of the literal inscriptions of thinking through a problem posed. As Parker’s work is about existence, he is always about the making of art. 

While a 20th century exposure to the work of Robert Motherwell emboldened Parker to pursue his journey, Parker’s choice of vehicle and selected route positions him clearly in the 21st.  Within our contemporary framework, Parker characterizes and demarcates an archaeological space not of solutions but of open-ended constructions of conscious act and reason that speak to what it is to occupy the conundrum of our times as the more comprehensible increments of a life lived. Narrative is invoked and is provided a renewed life to speak once more with the distinctive language of our present era. For Parker this voice lay in the intentional iteration of encounter discovered by charting a course through process and concrete thinking.  In Parker’s words “It’s all in the break down, baby” as from complexity emerges directness and simplicity, and there resides beauty.